My Sordid Affair with Oiled McManChest

Well, ladies, gentlemen, and spambots, it's that time of year again. Yesterday was one of my absolute favorite holidays of all time!  (For those of you unfamiliar with the history and ceremonial customs of the festival celebrated yesterday, I suggest you go read this excellent little post which concisely sums up the whole shebang.)

So considering the time of year, I thought it would be only fitting that my inaugural post address a topic very close to my heart: romance.  Or, more specifically

If I Hate Romance Novels, Why Can't I Stop Reading Them?

No, seriously, I'm asking.  I did not grow up reading my mom's romance novels under the covers at night (or anyone else's for that matter).  I was too busy teaching myself Elvish and engrossing myself in musical theater to bother with books that were, as far as I could tell, all about men and women acting stupidly on each other's behalf while having an exceedingly difficult time keeping their clothing buttoned/strapped/fashion tapped in its proper places.  (For reference: I still kill in obscure musical theater trivia, but retained no Elvish other than being able to kinda sing the Arwen love theme from the movie version of Fellowship.)

Of course, as a got well into my teenage years I became obsessed with Gothic Romanticism; I think I read for the first time Dracula, The Phantom of the Opera, Interview with the Vampire, and possibly also Frankenstein and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde all in the same eighteen month period somewhere between the ages of 14 and 16 for pleasure reading.  Yes, I know Anne Rice is kind of the embarrassing cousin at the classic lit reunion going on up there, but she was an example (if far from the best) of one the contemporary inheritors of the tradition.  However, what I'm getting at is that Gothic Romanticism is a lot more JMW Turner and the dichotomy of the grotesque/sublime than it is Fabio and boning.

Left: A view of the true sublime.  Right: A view of what you wish your hair would do.

So now fast forward another *mumblemumble* years, and I'm in my *muchmoremubling*th year of college, where I've spent a lot of time studying those books.  (Even Anne Rice.)  Except for Dr. Jekyll, I've read all of them at least 3 time, more in the case of Dracula and Phantom of the Opera.  I want to have Lord Byron's babies.  I can provide a brilliantly concise but descriptive definition of the sublime, and cross reference half-a-dozen examples in art, literature, and architecture.  Y'know what I read for fun recently?

This.  This is a steampunk romance novel called The Iron Duke, written by Meljean Brook, and featuring a male cover model I affectionately refer to as Sir Oiled McManChest. The plot of the novel goes something like:

Repressed police chick meets war hero sexy sexy airship pirates boning boning orgy nanotechnology boning snogging boning goggles snogging blow stuff up slightly rapey wardrobe malfunction boning boning happily ever after.


Okay, that's not entirely fair.  Brook actually does a really incredible job of setting up a plausible steampunk alt-history, and if ignored the Herculean amounts of sex that the two main characters manage to have, she'd probably get a lot more praise for her world building and attention to the actual results of Imperialism and how the world would have been affected had that power belonged to other countries.

Which brings me back around to main point: despite all the awesome worldbuilding, 85% of this book is characters having sex, attempting to have sex, thinking about having sex, and blowing stuff up (which is, in a sense, a lot like sex).  And this one is kind of the exception to the rule as far as romance novels go, since the sex actually vaguely ties in to an actual plot, whereas in most romance novels, the entire plot is no more complex than people have sex in various ways as dictated by the YKINMK* rule of sexytimes, the end.

*Your Kink Is Not My Kink, or the "Read the Label, Dumbass" rule

Now, I need to break in with another caveat here: I don't mind falling-in-love/snogging/sex/etc. as plot elements or subplots within the books I read of other genres.  I never have.  As you will begin to gather if you continue reading this blog in the future, I have very strong obsessions opinions about the way couples interact in specific works of classic and contemporary literature.  But up until the last...oh, let's say two years...I have actively steered clear of the mindless drivel of the romance novel world.  And now I find myself skimming through the free books section of the Kindle store going "hmmm...it's a romance...but her dress is pretty and the reviews say the formatting doesn't suck, so we're good!"

But I do have a theory.  Well, two theories, since maybe this really is just my single-girl subconscious screaming for tender manly affection from an idealized lover, and reading romance novels is less creepy than plastering pictures of Lt. Sharpe and Seth Starkadder all over my binders.

But the theory I think is more interesting, and possibly more accurate, is that romance novels are just doing a better job of crossing-over with other genres and hitting a higher level of literary value.  I mean, the classic historical romance goes back to Georgette Heyer, who A) was awesome and B) wrote as much about the fashion, manner, and history of the Regency period as she did about the characters falling in love.  Or there's books like Joanna Bourne's The Spymaster's Lady which I went out and bought after reading this review on Smart Bitches, Trashy Books about how brilliantly the author portrays the various languages, accents, and dialects the characters speak.  Here there's history, politics, and legitimate craft in the writing...oh, and a bunch of snogging.

(Also, it should be mentioned that after reading this post, I intentionally went out and found the pictured original cover instead of the new one, because if I'm going to read these then dammit I will suffer the shame of the embarrassing covers.  I call this guy Captain McManChest - I think he's maybe the grandfather of Sir Oiled up above.)

So that's my theory on how I, a Dickens-loving, Byron-worshiping, clever-language-connoisseur English major, ended up reading utterly ridiculous romance novels under the covers until 3am.  To be fair, I do try to have standards.  I mostly read historical romance, and my rare forays into contemporary only occur when elements of mystery or urban fantasy exist to mediate my general loathing of anything post 1950.  Also, if the characters are not named appropriately for their age/era/ethnicity/any combination thereof, and there's no legitimate explanation, I will frequently pass on a book to save myself the blinding rage of trying to justify them and failing.  That, you will learn, is one of my great pet peeves (as is non-historically accurate hair in period films - this topic will come up a lot).

Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to go stare at the man-candy on the covers of some cheap paperbacks I got from the library.